Portfolio Edge 2.0; Project Office 4.1. Pacific Edge Software, (425) 897-8800. www.pacificedge.com
Lori MacVittie is a Network Computing technology editor working in our Green Bay, Wis., labs. She has been a software developer, a network administrator and a member of the technical architecture team for a global transportation and logistics organization. Write to her at [email protected].
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As upper management demands business justification from the IT department, choosing and managing projects wisely has become a crucial task. IT portfolio-management products provide a sophisticated, though cumbersome, solution. These software systems let IT managers make well-justified decisions about which projects to start, drop or back-burner, while they give the rest of the company access to relevant data about each IT investment.
ITPM products include tools for tracking projects' time, resource and skill demands, as well as managing costs, mitigating risks, and shepherding each request through selection, prioritization and implementation. Analyzing the solutions' data requires a level of business acumen that rarely comes naturally to technical workers. Furthermore, IT staff may balk at the painstaking time records they must keep to make the products effective.
We tested three such packages: Artemis International Solutions' Artemis 7, Changepoint's Changepoint 8.01 and Pacific Edge Software's Portfolio Edge 2.0. All did their jobs well once we got the training we needed. Changepoint, however, wowed us with its broad list of features and high level of automation.
We tested the products by implementing them within our NWC Inc. infrastructure and attempting to integrate them with various existing systems--Active Directory for user authentication, as well as Oracle and SQL Server.
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